Quote

we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.

Angela Carter

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Angela Carter
Age: 51 †
Born: 1940
Born: May 7
Died: 1992
Died: February 16
Author
Journalist
Linguist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Eastbourne
Sussex
Angela Olive Stalker Carter
Angela Olive Carter
Angela Olive Stalker
Angela Olive Pearce
Take
However
Must
Seem
Paltry
Life
Alone
Trivial
Poor
Symbols
Nature
Absurd
Form
Forms
Seems
Determined
May
Blame

More quotes by Angela Carter

Image
Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.
Angela Carter
Image
Reciprocity of sensation is not possible because to share is to be robbed.
Angela Carter
Image
As for my father, few souls are less troubled. He can be simply pleased with us, pleased that we exist, and, from the vantage point of his wondrously serene old age, he contemplates our lives almost as if they were books he can dip into whenever he wants. His back pages, perhaps.
Angela Carter
Image
We do not go to bed in single pairs even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents' lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies-all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.
Angela Carter
Image
The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.
Angela Carter
Image
Spindly branches of buttercups were secreted among gleaming stems still moist at the roots from last night's rain that had washedand refreshed the entire wood, had dowered it in poignant transparency, the unique, inconsolable quality of rainy countries, as if all was glimpsed through tears.
Angela Carter
Image
Your thin white face, chérie he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect.
Angela Carter
Image
Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn.
Angela Carter
Image
His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.
Angela Carter
Image
Not for Moorcock the painful, infrequent excretion of dry little novels like so many rabbit pellets his is the grand, messy fluxitself, in all its heroic vulgarity, its unquenchable optimism, its enthusiasm for the inexhaustible variousness of things.
Angela Carter
Image
Why do you do up your hair in those tortured plaits, now, Melanie? Why? Because, she said. You know that's no answer. You're spoiling your pretty looks, pet. Come here. She did not move. He ground out his cigarette on the window-ledge and laughed. Come here, he said again, softly. So she went.
Angela Carter
Image
Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.
Angela Carter
Image
Home is where the heart is and hence a movable feast.
Angela Carter
Image
A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.
Angela Carter
Image
Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.
Angela Carter
Image
The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.
Angela Carter
Image
One beast and only one howls in the woods by night.
Angela Carter
Image
All artists, they say, are a little mad. This madness is, to a certain extent, a self-created myth designed to keep the generality away from the phenomenally close-knit creative community. Yet, in the world of the artists, the consciously eccentric are always respectful and admiring if those who have the courage to be genuinely a little mad.
Angela Carter
Image
Hollywood... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.
Angela Carter
Image
A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny's house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the woods is exactly as it seems.
Angela Carter